Viewing profile — mwheelz

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The premise is web pages have two readers, people and the AI reading for people. Web pages can now be written more for the AI and less for people. It’s a companion to an earlier pa…

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This is a real version of the critique and I've been thinking about it. The page leans on an IP-to-geo lookup that's known to be approximate (city-level on a good day, region-level…

Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a…

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Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today h…

Yeah, the bottom counter on the page is meant to make exactly that point. Mouse movements, scroll velocity, tab switches, reading pauses are all features in modern fraud / "trust" …

Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if…

Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including …

Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer…

The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode c…

The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the v…

Correct on rigor. Proving a fingerprint requires the two-visit protocol you describe. The page doesn't actually compute a stable fingerprint or attempt to track returning visitors,…

Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combi…

Fair pushback, and partially right. Most of these data points are individually defensible. Accept-Language helps with localization, Referer is just how links work, timezone is univ…

Update: I pushed two rounds of fixes for things people caught. 1. GPU "or similar" stranded prose. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" as the masked renderer string and my parser…

The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it…

Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cou…

Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is do…

The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.